Headline: A Middle East graveyard for western delusions

Sub-headline: Aleppo’s fall signals the collapse of US and European influence

The human catastrophe of Western colonialism, from its inception to the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the present humanitarian crisis in Syria, is reduced to a kind of mawkish self-pity by the headline writers at The Financial Times.That the greed and murderous ambition of the West, and its economic buccaneers, and now the coterie of technocrats at Think Tanks like Brookings and other institutions: who sell their wares and rent out their experts to the successors of that colonialism, has led to murder on a mass scale, and the surety and comfort that is offered by naming that barbarism as the product of the bad actors Putin, Iran and Assad and their allies ISIS!

As an American one is reminded with a stunning bitterness of the fall of Saigon, and witnessing the last helicopter departing from the American embassy, whose roof was filled with those who wished to leave, but had not the prestige, to qualify for that safe passage out of the failed neo-colonial project. And the video of that helicopter landing on an aircraft carrier, and seeing it pushed into the sea, as it was now just excess baggage, when once so very valuable!

Or watching R2P zealot Samantha Power lecture the Syrian ambassador at the UN Security Council, as her pivotal Adlai Stevenson moment, in the exercise of American virtue! While eliding from her narrative the obscenities of Afghanistan, Iraq , Abu Ghraib, black sites etc. American Exceptionalism is defined by a very selective, self-serving use of memory.